Established in 2006, the Keystone State Education Coalition is a growing grass roots, non-partisan public education advocacy group of several hundred locally elected, volunteer school board members and administrators from school districts throughout Pennsylvania. Our mission is to evaluate, discuss and inform our boards, district constituents and legislators on legislative issues of common interest and to facilitate active engagement in public education advocacy.

Over
the past 40 years, the per-student cost has doubled but achievement has remained
flat….right?

Over the past four decades,
the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while
our student achievement has remained virtually flat. Meanwhile, other countries
have raced ahead. The same pattern holds for higher education. Spending has
climbed, but our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with
other countries.

Pennsylvania pension
cuts would apply to all, Gov. Tom Corbett says

HARRISBURG, Pa.
— Gov.Tom Corbettacknowledged Thursday that his
administration is considering reducing future pension benefits for current Pennsylvania state
employees and teachers, and said any such cuts should be distributed evenly to
include lawmakers and judges.

PSBA PLEASED WITH DECISION
BY U.S.
DOE TO DENY PDE APPROVAL TO USE MORE LIENIENT METHOD TO DETERMINE AYP FOR
CHARTER SCHOOLS

Federal education officials have agreed with
PSBA's objection to the Pennsylvania Department of Education using more lenient
criteria to evaluate charter school achievement for Adequate Yearly Progress
purposes and has recently denied PDE's request to do so.

…..In the objection letter from PSBA to U.S.
DOE, the association argued this change for Pennsylvania is a violation of two
key principles at the heart of the federal NCLB requirements. First, NCLB
requires that every public school is to be evaluated in the same way and in
accordance with the same criteria and methodology. Second, NCLB requires that
schools be held accountable for the achievement of all students in the school,
not just some of them.

Duquesne school board agrees to cooperate with recovery officer

The Duquesne school
board voted unanimously Tuesday to cooperate with chief recovery officer Paul
B. Long, who was named by the state to develop a financial recovery plan for
the district.

The elected board
resumed power for the first time in Duquesne since October 2000 under the
authority of the new Financial Recovery Act, approved by the state Legislature
in June. For the previous dozen years the district was managed by a
three-member state board of control.

Three Republican members
of the ChesterUplandSchool District
board clarified the reasons they voted against adopting the financial and
academic recovery plan developed by Chief Recovery Officer Joseph Watkins,
saying voting in favor of the plan would have meant implementing it exactly as
written.
The board voted against adopting the plan Monday in a 5-4 decision that split
down party lines and allows the Pennsylvania Department of Education to seek a
receivership for the district.

William Penn Foundation
ousts outspoken president Jeremy Nowak

IT WAS JUST 17 months
ago that Jeremy Nowak strolled into the once-staid offices of Philadelphia's biggest locally oriented
philanthropy, the William Penn Foundation, as its new president - a big man
with big, radical ideas for change.

In a short time, the
former community-development guru thrust the $2 billion foundation into the
center of the fight over school reform in Philadelphia
- gaining both powerful allies and a few harsh critics, and putting the William
Penn Foundation in the headlines.

A New Campaign to Close Sub-Par Charter Schools

As enrollment in charters schools continues to
climb, a national organization is urging state legislators to draw a harder
line on setting standards for opening those schools and ensuring that weak ones
get shut down. TheNational
Association of Charter School Authorizers, a Chicago
organization that seeks to improve charters' quality by working with the
entities that create and oversee them, announced Wednesday that it is launching
what it calls a "One Million Lives" campaign to press
for changes in state law that hold charter schools and their authorizers more
accountable for performance.

Standardized Testing Costs States $1.7 Billion a
Year, Study Says

Standardized-testing regimens cost states some
$1.7 billion a year overall, or a quarter of 1 percent of total K-12 spending
in the United States, according to anew reporton assessment finances.

The report released Nov. 29 by the
Washington-based BrownCenter on Education Policy, at the Brookings
Institution, calculates that the test spending by 44 states and the District of Columbia
amounted to $65 per student on average in grades 3-9 based on the most recent
test-cost data the researchers could gather. (The BrownCenter report was not able to gather
that data from Iowa, Oklahoma,
South Carolina, West
Virginia, and Wyoming.)

Taxpayer-Enriched Companies Back Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence
in Education, its Buddy ALEC, and Their "Reforms"

This week in Washington, DC,
Jeb Bush's "Foundation for Excellence in Education" (FEE) is meeting
just five blocks away from the post-election conference of theAmerican Legislative Exchange Council(ALEC), the controversial corporate
bill mill working on profitizing public education among other legislative changes,
but the ties between the two groups are even closer.

Aptly named FEE, Bush's
group is backed by many of the same for-profit school corporations that have
funded ALEC and vote as equals with its legislators on templates to change laws
governing America's
public schools. FEE is also bankrolled by many of the same hard-right
foundations bent on privatizing public schools that have funded ALEC. And, they
have pushed many of the same changes to the law, which benefit their corporate
benefactors and satisfy the free market fundamentalism of the billionaires
whose tax-deductible charities underwrite the agenda of these two groups.

About Me

Mark Twain: "God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board."
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School Director, School District of Haverford Township, since 1999;
Chairman, Delaware County School Boards Legislative Council;
Founder and Co-Chair, Southeastern Pennsylvania School Districts’ Education Coalition/Keystone State Education Coalition, Board of Directors, PA School Boards Assocation
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